Tag sale

One thing I noticed when my category titles vanished is that it happened right around the time tags became all the rage. I’m not sure when WordPress ramped up its support of tags, but I would not be surprised if the upgrade that ate my category titles was one that added new support for tags. I’m sure this was not intentional, and it may have been coincidental, but the timing is interesting. In any case, I am taking the hint. WordPress has a handy two-way tag to category to tag converter, and I have used that to change the known categories to tags. The lost categories can stay categories until I decide what to do with them.

I can also decide what I think of that tag cloud in the right sidebar. It certainly makes clear which tags hang on the most posts. However, the engineer in me thinks it’s an ugly and unbalanced way to present the data. While the tags are in alphabetical order, the varying text sizes make it harder to look for a specific tag. The concept seems more of a marketing tool, designed to focus attention on the most popular tags. This sounds like typical shallow materialism — if there’s more of something it must be better (or more important). Since it’s my blog, I can do as I please with the tags and categories. I’ll be playing with the concept to learn more about it and perhaps make it work better to my own needs. We shall see.

-= G =-